Dirk Hartog was a 17th-century Dutch sailor and explorer. Dirk Hartog's expedition was the second European group to land in Australia and the first to leave behind an artifact to record his visit,the Hartog plate. His name is sometimes alte...

Abel Janszoon Tasman was a Dutch seafarer and explorer best known for his voyages of 1642 and 1644, in the service of the VOC (Dutch East India Company). His was the first European expedition to reach the islands of Van Diemen's Land (now T...

In 1606, the small Dutch ship Duyfken sailed from the Indonesian island of Banda in search of gold and trade opportunities on the fabled island of Nova Guinea. Under the command of Willem Janszoon, Duyfken and her crew ventured south-east....

The First Fleet is the 11 ships which left Great Britain on 13 May 1787 to found a penal colony that would become the first European settlement in Australia. The fleet consisted of two Royal Navy vessels, three store ships and six convict t...

In 1860–61, Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills led an expedition of 19 men with the intention of crossing Australia from Melbourne in the south to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north, a distance of around 3,250 kilometres (approxim...

Hiram Bingham III was an American academic, explorer and politician. He rediscovered the Inca settlement of Machu Picchu in 1911. Later, Bingham served as Governor of Connecticut and a member of the United States Senate. Machu Picchu ha...

Duke Kahanamoku, known as the "Big Kahuna," was an Olympic champion swimmer who is generally credited with having invented the modern sport of surfing. He was the first person to be inducted into both the Swimming Hall of Fame and the Surfi...

The 7 December 1941 Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor was one of the great defining moments in history. A single carefully-planned and well-executed stroke removed the United States Navy's battleship force as a possible threat to the Japanese E...